"Last week we had published The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, and to no real surprise, the feedback ranged from beliefs that it was propaganda to others being grateful that AMD finally shared some additional information with their Linux customers about the fglrx development cycle. While the article was far from being propaganda, what had outraged a number of open-source developers were AMD's comments on the R200 support or there the lack of. In this article, we have a few additional comments to share along with what some open-source developers had to say about AMD's information."

"[...] but because releasing source code gives away all the hardware details which is suicide in the market."

If this is truly and veritably the case with these drivers, then the drivers and hardware are flawed by design. The source code need only detail the *interface* to the card, not necessarily the _internals_ of it.

The commands that my OS of choice gives to the hardware, and how that hardware actually runs those commands are two totally separate things. (For example, my Linux kernel build is continually using x86_64 instructions to manipulate my Core2's hardware....but the Core2 chip itself actually compiles those instructions in microcode to a RISC-like set of operations which it then runs on the hardware.)